🚀 go-pugleaf

I will briefly poke my head up, out of lurker mode, for this one.  In
article <9C0D43A6BE3FA08B2D@vms2.uni-c.dk> Dieter Britz <BRITZ@kemi.aau.dk> writes:
>here is the next lot. You will perhaps admire my straight face in the
>abstracts below (I do), in the face of strong provocation, you'll have to
>admit. The flavour of the month seems to be clumps of neutrons; three out of
>the four suggest them, either as dineutrons (Yang), quad-neutrons (Matsumoto)
>or even up to 1E09 in a bunch (Fisher). In all cases, the observed anomalies
>of cold fusion are thus explained, it seems. 

Readers should be aware that explanations involving polyneutrons aren't
*totally* incredible, at least on the face of them.  (When you get down
to details ... more about that in a minute.)  Various more or less
credible models have been proposed that allow for the existence of very
weakly bound polyneutron states, particularly 6N and 4N, although the
main model positing that 6N would be weakly bound also says that 4N
would be slightly *un*bound.  A series of experiments looking for
polyneutrons using radiochemical techniques were performed by Anthony
Turkevich (U. of Chicago, a most reputable nuclear chemist) and his
colleagues during the late 1970s; Dieter, let me know if you're
interested, and I'll try to scare up a reference.

What is significant, however, is that these *very* careful experiments
(nobody in the world was better at stuff like that than Tony) turned
up not a shred of evidence for stable 6N, 4N, or any-other-N.  It's
fine to "explain cold fusion" in terms of some exotic mechanism like
this; but when extremely competent experimenters go to great lengths to
find the agent behind the exotic mechanism and fail, the explanation
begins to lose some of its appeal.  Bluntly, I have a lot more faith
in Turkevich than in the polyneutron advocates, and it will take more
than unreproducible claims of excess heat to change that.

As for ultraheavy hydrogen, let's not get ridiculous ...

-- 
Bill Johnson				| My suggestion for an Official
Los Alamos National Laboratory		| Usenet Motto: "If you have nothing
Los Alamos, New Mexico USA		| to say, then come on in, this is the
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